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The first part of this article outlines a dilemma in cultural studies and sociology of culture regarding the politics of aesthetics. This concerns whether discourse about the evaluation of symbolic forms serves to reinforce power relations and maintain divisions between people and communities, or whether evaluation can serve as a basis for greater commonality. One way of at least beginning to address this issue is to attend to the 'everyday aesthetics' of media audiences, exemplified here in the ordinary evaluative discourse of music users. The second part of the article reports on interview research about musical tastes and values. It analyses these interviews for evidence of the ways in which evaluative statements might involve making connections with others, or alternatively how they may act as barriers to social connectivity or community. How and to what extent might ordinary musical evaluation be thought of as part of potential aesthetic public spheres?

This is an important book, and deserves attention from ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, and students of popular culture across the disciplines. It is the first collection I am aware of to situate issues of the politics, semiotics, and cultural dynamics of musical appropriation in a broad, interdisciplinary context attentive to the theoretical projects of postcolonial and post-structuralist cultural studies. There have been several monographic studies and edited volumes in recent years that have explored some of this intellectual terrain; Gerry Farrell's Indian Music and the West (1997) and Jonathan Bellman's edited collection The Exotic in Western Music (1998) each approach art musics in terms of transnational appropriations and Orientalist cultural dynamics. And a wide range of work on popular music and globalization has taken up the thorny problematic of "appropriation" in terms of issues of ownership and cultural imperialism (a good example is Timothy Taylor's 1997 Global Pop). However, the disciplinary and empirical articulations achieved in this volume are in many cases novel and, in their totality, quite progressive. Simply by virtue of its serious commitments to interweaving popular and art music subjects, "western" and "non-western" idioms and perspectives, and textual and contextual emphases, it sets a fine example for a more dialogic and less ghettoized future musicology. The volume is comprised of exceptionally strong papers from both very well known and younger scholars, and it is relatively coherent as a whole while covering a huge range of topics and issues.

Call for Papers for a Master Class in Mainz on June 27–29, 2024. Deadline: March 15,
2024.